Norman Foster

Norman Foster. Networks offers a rare first-person insight into the ideas, influences, and connections that have shaped one of the world’s greatest architects. Penned and curated by Foster himself, it brings together eight immersive essays in which he explores architecture not as a professional pursuit, but a nexus of passions, disciplines, and lived experience. In Roots, Foster examines his modest start in Manchester alongside his lifelong fascination with aviation, tracing the formative threads that underpin his work. Flight emerges as both obsession and metaphor, informing his pursuit of lightness, efficiency, and technical elegance. His deep attachment to the Alpine landscape—where he lives in a self-designed home of the future—reveals how place, climate, and topography continue to shape his thinking. Nature, Art, and Making are explored as essential creative partners to his architectural practice. The essays on Place and Cities widen the lens, considering memory, identity, and civic life, and how buildings collectively shape the public realm. Illustrated with nearly 1,000 photographs, sketches, artworks, film stills, and other cultural references, this extraordinary book is both a visual atlas and an intellectual framework—a self-exploration of the thinking behind such iconic works as Apple Park in Cupertino, the Reichstag in Berlin, the British Museum’s Great Court in London, the Millau Viaduct in France, and the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi. It brings into focus the ideas, curiosities, and connections that define this colossus of modern architecture.

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, a stone’s throw from the Thames. His workshop became in its day the equivalent of Google and Apple combined, attracting the country’s best in engineering talent. Their story of innovation and ambition tells how precision engineering made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.

In the early nineteenth century, Henry Maudslay, an engineer from a humble background, opened a factory in Westminster Bridge Road, a stone’s throw from the Thames. His workshop became in its day the equivalent of Google and Apple combined, attracting the country’s best in engineering talent. Their story of innovation and ambition tells how precision engineering made the industrial revolution possible, helping Great Britain become the workshop of the world.

Since its initial publication in 2010, "The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure" has become a standard reference for designers; this new edition brings the indispensable volume back into print.The design of infrastructural networks--the systems that enable flow within a structure such as a city, like roads and railways--is among urban design's foremost tasks. Around the globe, the awareness of enhanced infrastructure fluidity as a catalyst for economic development is rising."The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure" investigates how infrastructure design determines the organization and flow of the inhabited landscape--as an agency of enhanced mobility, as a physical presence, as a design feature contributing to the character of a city and as a sound theoretical approach to a positive experience of collective space.In this volume, these four issues are explored in four chapters that catalogue these approaches, and each chapter is buttressed with key projects from around the world by designers such as Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, OMA, Arata Isozaki, Paul Andreu, Xaveer De Geyter, Jean Nouvel and Ricardo Bofill. The authors demonstrate how the creative potential of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design is essential to the effective flow of infrastructural networks.